The national leaders of the "Defund the Police" movement are in my hometown of Chicago for the Democratic National Convention this week. As a South Sider, I saw firsthand the impact of this heavily ideological movement on my neighborhood — the very neighborhood these politicians professed to be helping.
Crime shot up. Innocent civilians lost their lives to increasingly brazen criminals. Smash and grabs went up. Mobs stormed the streets. Carjackings no longer made the news. And on.
The police officers felt the negative impact and a few brave officers persisted in policing despite the greater risk to their safety. The last businesses around here went belly-up. The public schools remain dismal failure factories.
Where are the social workers that these politicians wrote about in the New York Times that would magically reduce violence in neighborhoods like mine?
There’s been no reckoning for these politicians who paid no price for their dangerous ideas that caused deaths among Blacks to spike. Now, I just learned the news from a local paper that the DNC is allocating $75 million in federal security funding for the protection of their politicians during the convention. Most of those funds will go to the Chicago Police Department.
Talk about blatant hypocrisy. For years, we’ve watched Defund the Police politicians like Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., spend tens of thousands of dollars on private security for themselves. Vice President Kamala Harris supported the movement. Why security for them and not us, the people? Why do we the people have to pay for their security while they, the politicians, weaken our security? How did we get so twisted?
What makes this even more hypocritical is that the Democratic Party is the party of equity. For the last decade, they’ve preached equity — equality of outcomes among races — as a paramount social good. Where is the equity in them, the political elite, receiving security protection while we, the working class, receive empty words along with violence that spills blood onto the concrete?
These same elites tell us that words matter. I agree. Their words lead to destructive actions in my community and what makes them even more hypocritical is that they claim to be saying these words in the name of helping us.
Not one of these people will make the trek from the United Center to my block to visit the $40 million Leadership and Economic Center that I am building. They’re more invested in dangerous slogans that give them political power than in doing the massively difficult work of transforming a population destroyed by post-60s liberalism. The Defund the Police movement was just a continuation of that destruction.
The time has come for us to stop falling for the false promises of these politicians and start building our future. The hope lies with The People and not the politicians.
